Medium transplant: House Flipper review (2019)
2025 postcommentary: Yeah, okay, this one's a rough read. It was the very first piece i'd actually sat down to write as a review, so the writing is brash, edgy, angry, terminally-online, and head-up-ass... Which was honestly i think the persona i was trying on at the time. maybe this is an indication of what kind of subconscious distress i was under in that Dark Time before i'd really started reckoning with myself. Can you believe this was written by someone 10 years older than the tender angsty age of 17? lmaoooooooo
anyway go here if you wanna read the original
Contrary to logical belief, House Flipper is not about taking houses and upending them roof-upon-foundations or flinging them in tumbling ballistic arcs in a reverse crush-the-castle situation, despite what the cover art would make you think, or what the actual bodily strength of the player character is (more on that later).
Ok, side note, by the way, look, this piece is being written at like 5:40am so if you’re going to expect any professionalism do yourself a favour and yeet that expectation out the damn window. Go defenestrate it. Real hard. Yeah. Give that thing a real good hard chucking. Don’t come back when you’ve yote that expectation so hard it comes back down making a noise like an unguided bomb from a WW2 movie. Wwweeeeeeeeooooooooouuuuuuuuu…
Also story spoilers… I guess… Not like the story really matters here.
Anyway the New Player Experience of House Flipper is actually just… Home Improvement, the game. You know that old Tim Allen TV series? Yes, that. You are literally paid to take peoples’ mistakes in managing their homes and make those mistakes… Disappear. Everything about the early game has you cleaning up after other people (inb4 ‘ueeehhhhh?’). Not to say that all of said cleaning is really… Justified? For example, one of the first jobs you take on in order to actually get money in order to houseflip is to just clean the place up and redecorate it because it is owned by a recently bewidowed man who lacks both the mental and physical strength to do so. It’s a nice job to do, because it’s a good introductory stage on the path to slowly acquainting you with all the different mechanics of the game (specifically for this job: the cleaning, painting, and purchase/placement of furnishings and fittings) and you’re helping someone deal with their grief and move on from a tragic point in their life. It’s a generally nice and wholesome experience with that in mind.
On the other side of the I-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-charge-you to I’m-adding-a-ridiculously-high-asshole-surcharge scale, however, is the somehow flamboyantly gay(?) and extremely vain and flirty dude who has moved into the same house that his cousin is also raising her family in. You’d think that someone like that would be the Capital-A Artist in this situation but nooooOOO it’s the cousin instead. Through almost far too many words in an email with six (6) emoticons, that asshole tirelessly sweettalks you making reference to his chArMInG FACadE whilst also detailing the changes he wants to make to the decor of a house which I should remind you that
- doesn’t belong to him,
- his cousin and her children still live in, and
- is getting those changes done whilst his cousin is away on a “tournée” and obviously isn’t around to consent to those changes.
A living is a living and videogames are videogames, but in my headcanon I charged him an extra 150% for the job and then surreptitiously emailed his cousin to remind her of her rights and then to kick him out and sue the fuck out of him and offer to revert all the work for free afterwards because: fuck if he’s gonna be an impositional piece of shit and jizz his big floppy “toned and quiet colours” boner all over the entirety of someone else’s house. And also why not take his damn money while I’m at it because obviously he has more of it than sense. Grassroots redistribution of wealth, bitches.
I’ve left it real late, but I might as well commit to actually explaining what the actual premise of the game is and what its title means. House Flipper is the Eurojank Job Simulator game for the professions known as Real Estate Brokerage, Interior Design, and Renovation. I straight up lied when I said it was Home Improvement, because it’s Property Brothers instead hue hue whoops gotcha there don’t say I didn’t warn you. You buy a house in disrepair (commonly known in North America as a “fixer-upper” cos you “fix her up”… er) and then clean, repair, remodel, repaint, refurnish etc to your heart’s content and then put it back up for auction for what seems like an exorbitant and comfortable profit… Except when you start to really consider all the labour costs and all the time you’ve invested and especially all the time and labour expenses that the game glosses over for ludological reasons, it isn’t really that much of a profit. It’s called house-flipping because as per accounting terminology, the house that is being “flipped” is part of your Real Estate company’s Inventory that has been Turned Over. Hence, flipped, hence, flipping. Yes, it’s dumb, I know. And if you’re thinking “ok hold on this sounds very simplified and doesn’t seem that truly realistic”, hold that thought because it’ll be important later.
It’s also been a real weird experience for people like me to have actually played this game, especially as a person who lives in a big city where property prices have been inflating continuously for pretty much his entire lucid life. Especially as a person who lives in a city where the property market has been cooling in the past few months because despite the actually record number of new residential construction projects, because nobody can actually afford those goddamn overpriced luxury condominium apartments. But of course, this is the real world, governed by the naively idealistic rules of capitalism, where people do things because they are profitable, not because they are sensible. See, you’d think it’d be logical for property developers to build more low- and medium-cost housing because of the actual amount of demand for that kind of housing from mid-twenties to mid-thirties workers of both the blue- and white-collar kind, rather than the luxury tat they’re actually building in anticipation of corporate executive demand that actually isn’t goddamn there and is predicated on the honestly shaky assumption that Toronto is going to be the tech startup capital of Canada; they’re developing for profit, not for sensibility, those absolute cunts, those fucking idiots, I hope they get priced out of their apartment and then have to go live in an old cheap run-down housing dorm with popcorn ceilings because their condo got en-bloc’d, fuck them, they deserve it. There isn’t a single property in the game where I keep wishing I could just raze the entire house and instead build a medium-rise apartment block because holy shit look at the land plots it’s almost as if the houses have an actual land footprint of only at most a quarter of the land parcel they sit on and the rest is just lawn what the fucky fucking fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK this is one of the most inefficient uses of land and those myopic NIMBYs in their Homeowners’ Associations and their delusions of grandeur drunk on their slim hold on power will very easily block any of it and I. HATE. All of that.
You know what else I also hate? Some of the achievements. You get achievements for selling to each of the game’s pre-scripted prospective buyers, and all of them will be on hand to bid on every single house you sell (it’s ludonarrative dissonance don’t worry about it) so you’ll have to draft, remodel, design, and furnish the houses accordingly for each individual buyer. This makes sense until you realise that certain buyers have overlapping likes and dislikes, and certain buyers have far more purchasing power than others. Let me introduce you to two choice buyers in the game:
Chang Choi, 20, student, likes bookshelves, a small house, a study area near the bed, no frills.
Dolan Trusk, 56, tax official, likes bookshelves, a small house, a study area near the bed, no frills, nicely furnished home office.
This is the part where I remind you that after you sell a house, the buyer remains on the market for another one, and that because of the auctioning rules, you have to sell to the highest bidder. You can guess who has the much higher purchasing power. You can guess how much their preferences overlap, because I just told you. You can guess why the global attainment rate of one buyer’s achievement is 1.3%, whilst the other’s is 37.8%.
There’s a lot of questions that can be asked from that one single situation. Why is a student in the property market? Why is said student competing in the same property market as semi-retired government officials, landlords, playboy socialites, professional artists, retired septuagenarians, and entire goddamn families? Is the financially loaded foreign student stereotype such a prevalent one that it warrants inclusion alongside a Donald Trump satire? Is the inherent unfairness in the game’s design purposefully done to mimick the inherent unfairness that is present in the real world’s housing markets? In a video game market where it’s generally agreed that gameplay design decisions are made according to what is fair, is this baked-in unfairness part of a specific message that the developers want to say? In what universe is a professional artist rich enough to afford landed fucking property in the goddamn USA?
And just to tie into how actually goddamn realistic this game is, don’t any of you dare to argue with me that this game isn’t set in the USA or Canada. It fucking is.
Wall sockets? All Type B, no exceptions.
Switches? Either the standard North American toggle switch that hasn’t changed since the 1930s (I’ve been to the ruins of Ellis Island that date to specifically that time and seen a switch exactly like that so I can genuinely attest to how old that design is) or a modern design of the rocker switch that is either called a “Decora” or a “Decorator” switch and is specifically manufactured by American company Leviton.
All the prospective buyers? All based in the US.
All of that points to a game solidly set in the US, or a territory where US residents can easily access and/or easily dominate the property market, which still only really points to the continental US. This brings me to the actual nitpicky point: construction of interior walls. Whilst you cannot change the outer walls of any property you are remodelling, you are free to rearrange any interior walls to your heart’s content. Whilst your ability to ignore load-bearing walls and columns is already sufficiently out there, what’s even more ridiculous is how you construct interior walls and lintels. Whilst you might not remember it by the late game because of a skill that paints them as you construct them, they’re actually made of brick and mortar. Whilst I generally agree with this method of construction, being from a country where most dwellings are made from prefabricated steel-reinforced concrete, it bears no relation to how interior walls are constructed in modern North American houses.
For completeness’ sake, here’s how interior walls are constructed: First the area where the wall is supposed to go is marked out, and a wood or metal frame is erected first. This frame is the “stud” that stud finders look for when you’re looking to mount a picture or some shelves. Second, drywall panels are attached to one side of the frame, providing a “back-panel”. Third, the contractor then puts the thermal and/or sound insulation against the mounted drywall, and then seals the insulation in by mounting more drywall to the other side of the wall frame. Fourth, any gaps in the drywall panels and between the panels and any existing wall is finished off with plaster. Fifth, electrical mountings are an afterthought in House Flipper so I’m not going to bother. Sixth, as I must remind you: no bricks.
Oh, and just to tie up another slightly relevant hanging thread, one of the Steam achievements in this game requires you to pick up a car.
And move it.
With your hands.
Because you can actually do that.
excussez-moi pourquoi
Despite all of that, I was able to spend 14.4 of my precious hours playing this game as of writing, and it managed to be a bestseller on Steam for a good few weeks. I’ve got a good idea too of why this unrealistic product of a studio’s collective flight of fancy has done so well: specifically because it is a flight of fancy. It is particularly because of the economic climate that we have found ourselves in, a climate where many urban millennials have adopted a semi-itinerant existence, moving between myriad rental homes without the benefit of a fixed address, that we’ve come to see the idea of a permanent dwelling to call our own, to do with as we wish, as either improbable far-flung future or nostalgic memory of a long-lost childhood. There are very few of us who have had merely the opportunity to truly turn a house into a home, much less also have the means to fully realise that opportunity. House Flipper is fantasy fulfilment, no doubt, and it is a fantasy borne of a reality that was promised and subsequently denied to us.
Developers Empyrean / Frozen District might not have intended it to be as such upon its Steam Greenlight release in late 2017, and the fulfilment of a house ownership fantasy might not ultimately be useful in helping deal with the late-capitalist economic hellscape of the year 2019, but if taking a run-down dwelling and slowly and granularly turning it into a fitting home again sounds in any way fulfilling to your soul, it doesn’t get better than this.